“Even should you worry yourself to death with works, still your heart cannot thereby raise itself to such a faith as the Law calls for.”[38]
Thus, by the Law alone, and without the help of Luther’s “faith,” we become sheer “martyrs of the devil.”
It is this road, according to him, that the Papists tread and that he himself, so he assures us, had followed when a monk. There he had been obliged to grind himself on the Law, i.e. had been forced to fight his way in despair until at last he discovered justification in faith.[39] One thing that is certain is his early antipathy—due to the laxity of his life as a religious and to his pseudo-mysticism—for the burdens and supposed deadening effect of the Law, an antipathy to which he gave striking expression at the Heidelberg Disputation.[40]
Luther remained all his life averse to the Law.[41] In 1542, i.e. subsequent to the Antinomian controversy, he even compared the Law to the gallows. He hastens, however, to remove any bad impression he may have made, by referring to the power of the Gospel: “The Law does not punish the just; the gallows are not put up for those who do not steal but for robbers.”[42] The words occur in an answer to his friends’ questions concerning the biblical objections advanced by the Catholics. They had adduced certain passages in which everlasting life is promised to those who keep the Law (“factores legis”) and where “love of God with the whole heart” rather than faith alone is represented as the true source of righteousness and salvation. Luther solves the questions to his own content. Those who keep the Law, he admits, “are certainly just, but not by any means owing to their fulfilment of the Law, for they were already just beforehand by virtue of the Gospel; for the man who acts as related in the Bible passages quoted stands in no need of the Law.... Sin does not reign over the just, and, to the end, it will not sully them.... The Law is named merely for those who sin, for Paul thus defines the Law: ‘The Law is the knowledge of sin’ (Rom. iii. 20).”—In reality what St. Paul says is that “By the Law is the knowledge of sin,” and he only means that the Old-Testament ordinances of which he is speaking, led, according to God’s plan, to a sense of utter helplessness and therefore to a yearning for the Saviour. Luther’s very different idea, viz. that the Law was meant for the sinner and served as a gallows, is stated by W. Walther the Luther researcher, in the following milder though perfectly accurate form: “In so far as the Christian is not yet a believer he lacks true morality. Even in his case therefore the Law is not yet abrogated.”[43]
“A distinction must be made,” so Luther declares, “between the Law for the sinner and the Law for the non-sinner. The Law is not given to the righteous, i.e. it is not against them.”[44]
The olden Church had stated her conception of the Law and the Gospel both simply and logically. In her case there was no assumption of any assurance of salvation by faith alone to disturb the relations between the Law and the Gospel; one was the complement of the other; though, agreeably to the Gospel, she proclaimed the doctrine of love in its highest perfection, yet at the same time, like St. Peter, she insisted in the name of the “Law,” that, in the fear of sin and “by dint of good works” we must make sure our calling and election (2 Peter i. 10). She never ceased calling attention to the divinely appointed connection between the heavenly reward and our fidelity to the Law, vouched for both in the Old Testament (“For thou wilt render to every man according to his works,” Ps. lxi. 13) and also in the New (“The Son of Man will render to every man according to his works,” Mt. xvi. 27, and elsewhere, “For we must all be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ that everyone may receive the proper things of the body according as he hath done, whether it be good or evil,” 2 Cor. v. 10).
[3. Encounter with the Antinomianism of Agricola]
Just as the Anabaptist and fanatic movement had originally been fostered by Luther’s doctrines, so Antinomianism sprang from the seed he had scattered.
Johann Agricola, the chief spokesman of the Antinomians, merely carried certain theses of Luther’s to their logical conclusion, doing so openly and regardless of the consequences. He went much further than his master, who often had at least the prudence here and elsewhere to turn back half-way, a want of logic which Luther had to thank for his escape from many dangers in both doctrine and practice. In the same way as Luther, with the utmost tenacity and vigour, had withstood the Anabaptists and fanatics when they strove to put in full practice his own principles, so also he proclaimed war on the Antinomians’ enlargement and application of his ideas on the Law and Gospel which appeared to him fraught with the greatest danger. That the contentions of the Antinomians were largely his own, formulated anew, must be fairly evident to all.[45]